YOUR SOURCE FOR TRUTH

Saturday, June 20, 2015

'Science is a method for finding truth'

“God
moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform; / He plants His
footsteps in the sea / And rides upon the storm.” William Cowper
(1731-1800)

I
earned my living, spent my life, trying to see that which cannot be
seen. Understanding creates lost innocence even when clouds have a
silver lining. Science makes no excuses when it finds mysterious ways.

Dilemma

Farmer
John was in a quantum dither. His oak tree “knew” when it was the
season for planting. It signified that by sending forth green shoots,
but climate change was not helping. If John did not improve yields he
would lose his farm. Should he rotate crops, fertilize differently, or
irrigate more? It would take too long to examine these things one at a
time.

John’s
ability to learn from past experiences would not be helpful. They
created a false illusion of validity. A computer helped John plan
simultaneous modifications during a single season. It found what
mattered, the optimum, and whether any of the changes depended on the
others, but it required just enough imagination to guess. Solutions
might be hidden from view. Too many variables would take John in
circles.

His
wells could run dry. Nature was aiming at a target, but she was not a
good shot. John’s personal situation was the only reality and it might
turn out to be atypical. John wanted to be confident. The computer
gave him its estimate of the upper and lower bounds that modifications
could bring. The only problem was that they widened whenever he asked
for more certainty.

Length,
width, and height are the only dimensions that John could visualize,
but the mathematical model created by his computer had more. There was
one for every variable! John contemplated the mystery of life. If he
knew everything, what would the point of living be?

Incarnation

John
wondered what would have happened had he taken the other road. He
wrestled with his decision. He had to move forward dealing with its
consequences because he could not move backward, but could he move
sideways in boundless reincarnation?

In
1957, Hugh Everett’s doctoral thesis explained that we live in a
universe of hidden dimensions. Whenever we make a choice between the
high road and the low road, an unseen but correlated copy of us takes
the other path. Everything that can happen does.

Unseen
worlds are impossible to prove or disprove and immensely complex;
however, John had to remember that all his actions did not involve
choices. It is also very complicated to think that everything that
occurs is under God’s control. John suspected that he was an accident,
but is possibility an adequate explanation for the entire universe?

Destiny

If
John’s not in control of his life, what is? Things didn’t turn out
exactly as he planned. Was destiny only an illusion? In classic
mythology, it was explained by the Moirae whose duty was to see that
each person’s fate, assigned at birth, was carried out. In the arts,
fortune was depicted as a spindle, scroll, and scissors or pair of
scales.

It
is a question as old as thought. Is a universe which is infected by
uncertainty but follows laws just a machine? We experience the joy and
sorrow of the consequences of what our choices create, and we discover
ourselves as much as the world that was our past and will be our
future. Isn’t the fuzzy logic of what could be as real as truth or
falsity?

Scientific

Science
is a method for finding truth, not a body of absolute truth. John was
reluctant to “just believe”. He knew that science knows what works! Was
science exceptional because other forms of human endeavor were so
lacking in objectivity? Were questions that science could not answer
flawed? Was science objective or prejudiced when it explained the
unseen? Was it factual when it understood the micro-cosmos and
macro-cosmos as more of the same? Was it true that John could only
directly affect that which he could touch? John was trapped within a
web of truth that did not satisfy his doubts. He turned to applied
science and its roots in the two hole experiment hoping to come to grips
with the reality of possibility.

Two Holes

A
wobbly target shooter slowly fires at two spaced holes in a
bullet-proof armor plate. Most of his bullets are stopped by the armor,
but some get through. A few ricochet or diffract slightly from the
edges of a hole, but those that pass go one at a time. Their impact on
the target behind is abrupt, at a point, and can be counted, but it’s
the pattern that matters, not hitting the bull’s eye.

In
the very tiny world, a single indestructible bullet can go through both
holes simultaneously, as long as no one is looking! When more shots
are fired, the bullets land in bands, exactly like those caused by wave
reinforcement and cancellation, and not always behind a hole. There are
places on the target where many hits accumulate when either hole is
open, but when both holes are opened those hits go towards zero instead
of increasing as expected.

Each
bullet “knows” whether or not the opposite hole is open or closed. It
is only when both holes are open that the bullet’s point of impact is
deflected in an uncertain, but probable way. Each individual bullet
appears to simultaneously pass through both holes getting in the way of
and interfering with itself. But the bullets do not split apart. They
seemingly start as a particle, travel as a wave, become two interfering
waves after passing through the two holes, and miraculously collapse to
once again become a particle making a single point of impact.

Why
do identical bullets in the same situation behave so differently?
Hidden probability waves are an answer. No one has ever seen one and
they never actually do anything. They are a tendency, a proxy for the
bullet’s behavior, instead of a disturbance in a propagating medium.
They predict, but don’t give values, just chances. They depend on the
shooter, bullet, armor, target, and observer. They are all together.

If
one looks to know which hole the bullet passed through, the
interference pattern goes away. It makes sense because there is only
one bullet. It cannot pass through both holes interfering with itself.

Perhaps
bullets have no deep external reality. Bishop George Berkeley
(1685-1753) saw God as the patron observer of our sensible universe. He
realized that it was impossible to know something that is not an idea.
Consciousness contemplates itself to know that it exists.

But
what if the bullet did not pass where the observer was looking? A
bullet that is not there cannot be molested by measurement, but it gives
information that changes probability. Probability is not a solid
object like a rock or tree. New information changes it.

A
single bullet’s behavior can be confounded by closing a hole and
interposing an additional adjustable two hole screen behind the first
after the projectile is already in flight. It shows that the bullet is
neither wave nor particle. Observation determines instead of finding
which, but what makes any observer a special participant in creation?
Nature will not allow her possibilities and predictions to be
constrained by certainty.

Information
is never lost, but there is a trade-off in the simultaneous knowledge
of complementary dynamic properties like locality and momentum. They
will always be dispersed and describable only in terms of probability.
Perfect knowledge of one means complete ignorance of the other. Is it a
forest or trees? It all depends on how you look at things.

A thought experiment called Schrodinger’s Cat,
gave John a clue about the line between the tiny world and everyday
experience and how possibilities become transformed into actualities.

Entangled

Imagine
that there are two cats in adjacent boxes connected by thin airtight
sliding central partitions that can be closed to completely block the
passage between the cats. We have introduced a single molecule of
cyanide gas in the center that must be closer to one or the other cat
box. In each box there is a super sensitive detector that will find
that molecule if it is present and release more killer gas. When the
sliding doors are closed there is a fifty percent chance that the
molecule could have drifted to either box and its probability wave
eventually spreads equally through both boxes. Like the bullet that
passes through both holes, the cats are simultaneously dead and alive.

Next
we take the separated cat boxes on an airplane trip to opposite sides
of the earth where an observer will open his box to check out his cat.
When he does that, both probability waves magically collapse into the
reality of their cat’s condition. The ghosts of the simultaneously
alive and dead cats evaporate.

If
the observer in Beijing looks first and finds a dead cat, it means that
the observer in New York, for certain, will find a live cat. The
Beijing observer instantly determines the reality of the New York
observer, though the connection between the two events is unseen. From
each observer’s point of view there is only one universe and he lives in
it. But life and death have split into parallel universes and the cats
are mates to the end of time and space as long as they remain
undisturbed.

Is
it a change in knowledge or cat health? A bullet that behaves as wave
and particle is more than just believing. Worse yet, we could be
unwittingly, inadvertently responsible for what happens at the opposite
side of the earth.

An
instantaneous connection between events on opposite sides of the
universe is disturbing. Who controls when and what? Because we are all
in motion, with respect to one another, it allows “B” causing “A”,
instead of the opposite. It leaves open the possibility of time travel
into the past.

What
is an observer? Imagine John was in the box along with his cat and I
asked him if it was simultaneously dead and alive. He would answer no.
The probability wave would not collapse into my actuality because he
had not told me which. For me, the cat’s life or death remains equally
probable. His observation could be reversed if I looked, and he would
have to forget how he saw his cat. This can be explained if John, the
molecule, and the cat are all in limbo, but then we are talking about
things that are larger than atoms and he still saw the cat as dead or
alive, not both. What if somebody was watching me and so on, watching
the watcher to infinity, stopping only at an omniscient creator who
experiences no uncertainty?

The
line between probability and reality is a fuzzy one. Tiny
uncertainties propagate into highly entangled lives. The butterfly in
Beijing that caused the hurricane in Florida by flapping its wings
reveals a process that is very sensitive to initial conditions, but this
is a long and twisted path that is difficult to see.

Why

John
knew that he could not go through life without being influenced by
other observers. He was the one who was nonsensical, not nature. It
was more about how his brain was wired for thought than what he knew.
That was the mystery.

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